


i wanna love you / but i don't know how

by helenecixous



Category: Gone Girl (2014), Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
Genre: F/F, ahhh happy birthday tori !!!, and neither am i, im sorry it's late rip in pieces, margo isn't very good at doing things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 16:13:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8923801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helenecixous/pseuds/helenecixous
Summary: Margo Dunne is like a fucking bus - when you want her she’s nowhere to be seen, and when you don’t… well. She’s got fifteen texts to finish that analogy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [firelordazulas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/firelordazulas/gifts).



It’s five thirty on a Saturday morning. There is absolutely no reason for Rhonda to be up so early on any day, let alone a weekend, but here she is. Her fingers are curled around a steaming mug of coffee, on her knees there perches a cat, across her shoulders is a plaid shirt, buttoned up wonkily. Through the window she is facing, the sky is a dusty, rose pink, and in her bed there sleeps a stranger. Maybe  _ stranger  _ is too vague a concept, when you’re in the job she’s in, when you live in a town like this one, no one is a real stranger. You have tenuous links with everybody, whether you know their brother’s niece’s wife, or whether your childhood best friend married the breeder of your cat, you know them. And they all definitely know her. She’s that detective, the one who was involved in  _ that case,  _ the one with the Dunnes, you know it?  _ That  _ one. The case that’s never not accompanied by nudges and waggles of eyebrows and meaningful stares.  _ That  _ case.

Rhonda sighs, shakes her head and scratches the cat, Oscar, behind the ear as she watches the sky lighten. She’s never not thinking about that case, just like everybody else. She’s worked four others since then, and yet there’s never not a morning when she’s not sitting in that spot thinking, somehow, of Nick Dunne, and Amy Elliott Dunne, and - yeah. Of Margo too. Margo, whose shirt she’s wearing, Margo, who spent one night with her months ago, who left this shirt that Rhonda can’t bring herself to throw away, or return. Emotionally stunted Margo, who still tends The Bar, who had tried to move to Chicago after Amy had her child, and moved back within two months, because she ‘couldn’t deal with all of those sorority type girls’, according to Nick. She sighs, again, and drains her coffee, wondering briefly whether she should wake the woman in her bed, and how to kick her out gently, preferably without explaining that if she was going to be embarking again on weekends that reek of domesticity, it isn’t ever going to be with a one night stand.

She starts, and Oscar jumps down, mewling indignantly as he stalks off, leaving her to throw one last furtive glance to the window, to that Amy-pink sky, before she stands and moves to shower before she starts planning on how best to exercise damage control in the bedroom.

 

By ten in the morning, the woman has gone, and credit to her she went easily enough, and Rhonda has sank down into her sofa, weary and sick of the day already, making a mental shopping list for whenever she can be bothered to move, or whenever she realises just how low on coffee she’s running, and panics. Whichever comes first. She’s flirting with the idea of going for a run later, when her phone starts ringing, and although she’d deleted the contact in a not very calculated burst of anger months ago, she recognises the last four digits.

She stares at it, watches it buzz itself to the very edge of the cushion before she makes up her mind and grabs it, jabbing the accept button and holding it tentatively up to her ear. “Boney,” she answers, half expecting a dial tone.

There’s a beat of silence, and Rhonda tears at the chapped skin on her lips as she waits.

“Rhonda?” Margo’s voice is small - no, not small. Just tinny, as though she’s phoning from inside a bucket. “Sorry, fucking terrible signal. I’m, I’m in the car.”

“And I’m on the couch,” Rhonda offers, ignoring the way her heart is crawling up her throat. “What do you want, Margo?”

Margo starts to say something, and then stops, and all Rhonda can hear is road noise. “He’s moving back to New York,” she says finally. “Nick. He and Amy and the kid, they’re moving back to New York. He says it’s for the kid, that Marybeth and Rand have been hankering after them moving back since the  _ incident,  _ and that they want to spend time with the kid, and - he said that there aren’t any grandparents here in Missouri now, and that if they go back to the city then Amy will have things to do. He’s quit his job, he did that weeks ago -  _ weeks  _ ago, and this is the fucking first I’ve heard about it.”

Rhonda has to hold the phone away from her mouth as she scoffs, shaking her head in disbelief. “And what’d you want me to do about it?” she asks, not too kindly. “I can’t arrest him for wanting to move to New York, can I? You don’t expect that, right? I’m not going to drop them a visit and tell them that’s a bad idea. Maybe it’ll be good for them.”

“ _ Good  _ for them?!” Margo asks, and then stops. Rhonda can almost hear the gears turning in her head. “Ah shit, you’re pissed at me, aren’t you?”

“Pissed at you?” Rhonda asks, sarcasm seeping into her tone even as she tries to keep it even. “You’re gonna have to elaborate, I think.”

“Look - can I come over? I think we should, like, talk. Or something.”

“Like, talk or something? I’m busy, Margo.” She knows it’s childish, but there’s still something about that mess of a woman that makes her heart do silly things, and she isn’t used to sleeping with someone and then waking up to an empty bed with no note, and then months without so much as a phonecall or a text. It’s only her ego that’s bruised, she tells herself. She most definitely didn’t catch feelings for Margo Dunne, because that’s unprofessional and unethical and a frankly idiotic thing to do, because Margo Dunne has never experienced an entire feeling in her whole life.

Margo’s quiet on the other end, and Rhonda knows that she’s contemplating fighting it, contemplating telling her that they can’t keep avoiding each other, before she comes to the inevitable conclusion that it was never Rhonda doing the running. Right on time, Margo sighs, and Rhonda hears the engine stop.

“Okay,” she says, and the forced cheerfulness is enough to make them both wince, even over the phone. “Well, it’d be cool to catch up with you if you ever fancy a drink. Just… let me know, yeah?”

“Sure,” Rhonda agrees, holding her fingertips to her lip, which is now bleeding. “I’ll let you know.” She rings off before Margo can say anything else, and leans back into the cushions. She’s pissed. She’s really, really angry, that Margo Dunne will only talk to her when she wants to fuck, or when Nick’s fucked up and she needs to rant. She tells herself, again, that she won’t get sucked into it, that she won’t pay any attention to the way she’s softening already, the way her resolve is cracking and her stomach is fluttering, the way it makes her feel to know that even now, even after everything, she remains Margo’s first port of call when she  _ needs someone. _

 

Over the next few days she ignores the texts she receives, shoves her phone in her locker when she’s at work and pretends to not hear the incessant buzzing. She whines to Gil, tells him everything, and she’s got her head on her desk when she miserably tells him that Margo Dunne is like a fucking bus - when you want her she’s nowhere to be seen, and when you don’t… well. She’s got fifteen texts to finish that analogy.

“Don’t ya think it’s sweet?” he asks her, his feet up on the desk and bagel crumbs all over his trousers. “That she’s, like, tryin’ so hard?”

“Yeah but only when she wants somethin’,” Rhonda points out, staring at her coffee as though it holds all of the solutions to this problem she doesn’t know how to define.

“Ever thought that she just, I dunno, wants you?”

“She had me, though, didn’t she? Had me well and good, she did.”

“Yeah but that’s kinda terrifying,” James quips, smiling gently at her as he drains his coffee cup and tosses it into the bin. “I guess it’s like, a lot to deal with. Y’know, if your sister-in-law is loco and your brother is just as bad, and then ya start fallin’ for the detective who you only know because of all of that? And you can’t tell me you’ve never done the nasty with someone you really dig, and then panicked the next morning, and then panicked because you panicked and ran?”

“Jesus, Gil, you been reading Tiffany’s  _ Cosmo  _ magazines, or what? Next you’ll be tellin’ me that our zodiac signs aren’t compatible.”

He just grins at her and turns his attention back to his computer. “Kinda miss it, don’t you? We never get shit like that around here. I mean, I know it was freaky as hell, but at least we weren’t bored.”

“You weren’t the one who almost lost your job over it after she called you out for being incompetent in a room full of Feds.”

“What’s one small hitch? It was fun. Now we’re just up to our asses in druggies, and that’s it. That and your girlfriend drama.”

She throws a pen at him, which he dodges, and stands up. “I’m gonna go get a coffee.” She tilts the empty cup towards her and watches the dregs race to the side and pool along the crease. “Hey - do you reckon you could drown yourself in one of these?”

 

There’s only one light on at The Bar, but Rhonda knows that Margo’s in there. She’s sitting in her car, just around the corner, and she has been for the past fifteen minutes. She doesn’t know why she’s there, or what she’s going to do or say, she just knows that she misses Margo and she needs to talk to her - to sort this out with her. She just can’t bring herself to get out of the car. She exhales, tips her head back against the seat, and she tells herself that she’s just about to get out when the door to The Bar opens, and Margo emerges. Rhonda straightens up, and watches Go draw her jacket tighter around her, and jog to her car. She gets in, pauses only to throw her bag to the backseat, and drives off, leaving Rhonda groaning to herself in the dark.

 

She forces herself to get out and go shopping, and to leave her phone at home. Margo’s slowed down to just four or five texts a day, and as much as Rhonda now wants to talk to her, she refuses to do it with a phone involved through principle. She also wants to do it on her own terms, not when she’s fresh out of the shower or peeling veg for food, when she’s liable to forgetting to respond or forgetting to turn the oven down.

So she’s out in an oversized police department hoodie, her hair tied up messily, looking for all the world like she’s hungover, even though she’s not. She pushes the trolley around the store almost mechanically, throwing the usual shit into it and pausing only to grab a new brand of coffee that had been recommended to her. She’s paying zero attention to anything in her surroundings, the shop’s quiet, the music’s a little too loud, and so she jumps and almost drops the pasta she’s contemplating when Margo appears behind her.

“Do you still have that shirt of mine?” she asks, looking a little panicked, but determined all the same.

“What shirt?” Rhonda asks, sliding past her and walking up the aisle. Margo, of course, follows.

“C’mon, Rhonda, are you going to ignore me forever? This town’s too small for shit like that.”

Rhonda turns to look at her in disbelief. “ _ Me,  _ ignoring  _ you?”  _ she asks incredulously. “I’m not the one who disappeared for months, am I?”

“You are the one who apparently doesn’t know how to work a phone anymore,” Margo says, shrugging. “Listen, I know I shouldn’t have just taken off like that, I just-”

“I don’t think here is the appropriate place to be having this conversation.”

“Well it’s here or nowhere,” Margo says firmly, resting her hand on Rhonda’s forearm. “You’re an expert at ignoring calls, and I know why, I do. Just let me explain, okay?”

“Margo, I don’t-”

“Would you just listen to me?”

Rhonda inhales, and fixes her gaze somewhere above Margo’s left shoulder. “It was a one night stand, you don’t owe me anything. It wasn’t anything.”

Margo’s silent for a few seconds, before she shuffles her feet and ducks her head. “I don’t… I don’t think that’s quite true.” It’s only now that they both become aware of the fact that she’s not yet let go of Rhonda’s arm, and neither of them make a move to remedy that.

They finally look at each other, and Rhonda hates it. She hates Margo’s charm and her big eyes and small smile, she hates the way her hair falls and she hates,  _ hates  _ the way she’s missed this. Her hands find their way to Go’s neck and they pull her forward, and then she’s kissing her angrily, her fingers tight in her hair and her kisses bruising and greedy. Margo returns it just as much, and her hands fall to Rhonda’s hips, tugging her forward as she goes pliant beneath the older woman, kissing her and kissing her until they both break apart, colour high on their cheeks.

Margo smiles and rests her forehead against Rhonda’s, moves her hand and cups her cheek, drags her thumb over the detective’s reddened lips. “I love you,” she whispers. “I’m so shit at this and I freaked but I love you and I haven’t stopped loving you even though I thought I would, and I- I haven’t.”

Rhonda watches Margo’s lips intently as she listens, feels the words sink into her one by one, and she nods stiffly, pressing a kiss to Go’s thumb as it moves. “Let me fuckin’ pay for this lot, okay? And we’ll - we’ll go back to mine.”

Margo nods, steps back and follows as Rhonda pushes the trolley over to the self service machines, hardly daring to believe her luck. Rhonda half turns, and Margo sees her lips pull into that smirk she fell for.

“I do still have your shirt,” she says. “And you’re not gettin’ it back.”

**Author's Note:**

> title from neptune - sleeping at last


End file.
